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Month: February 2018

Call Me by Your Name only just reached the art house cinema in my hometown, where I’ve been visiting my parents. I’ve since seen it twice and cried both times. The adjectives frequently applied to it – sumptuous, sensual, rapturous – are all true. It’s an experience that transports you (or at least, me) out of the theater, and I spent its two-hour run nervous, turned on, submerged. It felt like falling in love. That is to say, the heady, sensory overdrive that makes every gesture, smell, and sound seem as if you’re on a different plane of experiencing. The film radiates the strange alchemy of infatuation, where by seeing and treasuring the mystery of another person, something as mundane as our own bodies and the spaces we take up can become transcendent. Timothée Chalamet’s self-conscious physicality as Elio is a revelation. It’s a film that will stick with me for a long time for many reasons, but it’s in no small part thanks to its most infamous scene.

Here’s a story that may sound familiar. There’s a teenage girl who’s reflective and mature enough to have trouble connecting with her peers, but is still emotionally naive. She and the boys her age look past each other. Like anyone, she still wants to experience love and acceptance. She wants to feel seen and heard by someone equally reflective. The first person to scratch that itch is a teacher, a coach, a mentor – an older man with the kindness and sensitivity she’s been craving. The gap between their ages is inappropriate, but so what? This is the closest she’s come to what being in love is supposed to feel like and age is just a number.

The age gap relationship is a taboo and often distasteful topic in real life and fiction, for good reason. It’s all too common for adults to take advantage of the skewed power dynamics at work with a younger love interest. The alleged responsible party is often just…not. There’s also an insidious tendency to blame the instigation or fallout of these relationships on young women (shout out to the people who nicknamed me Jailbait at 17). It’s disingenuous, however, to pretend that there isn’t compelling evidence for why a young girl would develop such feelings in the first place. The dark side of these entanglements have led to some of the most long-standing traumas in my life, and yet…I still find myself drawn to stories of scandalous age differences. It’s hard to know where to categorize these feelings in the context of my past, but I believe there’s a place for processing and experiencing healthy fantasies through fiction. Two stories that have been positive or even healing for me are good old Twin Peaks and the winter 2018 anime Koi wa Ameagari no You ni (Love is Like After the Rain).

Your green babydoll shift dress has proven to be one of the safest things you own. It’s old, cheap, and you got it on vacation in a foreign country so nobody else has it. It communicates enough personal style without demanding attention – a surprisingly impenetrable armor not of swagger, but of quiet girlishness. At your best, this dress makes you feel like you could make everyone fall in love with you in a nonthreatening, asexual way. But you’re not at your best, and the trusty green babydoll also makes you a little shinier than you actually are. It is the most reliable path through the angst of seeing your natural enemy.

A warm hello doesn’t make it past your throat. She waves. It’s not a friendly wave and it reaches you as a sort of sardonic “we’re on this shitty boat together for an evening, I guess.” You wave back and smile in your mind, but you can’t remember if you actually carried it out. You hope the green babydoll is softening your sad bastard pout into something sweeter and more demure. It strikes you that you want her to despise you but also to think of you as a small animal undeserving of her scorn.

You need another drink. You think about buying her a drink. You don’t. At the bar, she’s waiting to pay her tab. You both miscalculated the timing and are annoyed at being stuck in each other’s line of sight. You are trying to work up the courage to pay her tab, for reasons not entirely clear even to you. You are trying to condense every emotion you’ve ever felt – hatred, jealousy, respect, longing, a mutant strain of fondness, guilt – into one facial expression. It comes out as a thousand-yard stare.

You try to zap your daydream that you have only just become aware of directly into her brain through sheer force of will. In this dream it’s a boozy party still on the holiday side of winter and the clothes are more glamorous. This dress is a dark jewel tone silk – deep pine or midnight blue (it catches the light so beautifully that nobody can be sure). What it lacks in flash it makes up for in elegance, with a skirt that flutters when your boyfriend spins you and catches you in a perfectly executed hip lift – because this is a dancing event and you can do that now. Your mother’s diamond and ruby estate bracelet is on loan for the night. It’s late enough that cheeks are flushed and hair is out of place (half up, tendrils). You tend to dream in diaphanous pastels that blur at the edges but in this dream, you and your clothes are solidly rooted in the boundaries and sweat of real bodies. In the glow of alcohol and celebration you smack straight into her and don’t have time to wipe the unguarded, dance-crazed grin off your face so you take the risk of leaving it there. This gambit not only manages to neutralize everything that has come before, but her heart is utterly captivated by how charming and actually nice when you get to know her you seem to be. You laugh loudly and sincerely and dance together with the joy only two drunk people could. Some time later you see a photo a friend snapped without either of you noticing. Your smile is real and crooked in a way that only shows up when you don’t feel watched. Your arms look very skinny. You never go on to become close friends, but you are always genuinely glad to see each other. You both treasure the candid photo and count it among the most flattering pictures ever taken of you, respectively and collectively.

Everyone online is talking about skincare! Actually they already were, but last week a skincare-critical article in The Outline brought it to the forefront and also led outlets who already publish stories about skincare on a daily basis to exclaim “everyone is into skincare?!”

Like most of my millennial skincare enthusiast peers, I wasn’t a fan of the Outline piece. I didn’t appreciate the assumption that those of us who choose to be passionate about skincare are somehow being duped or fooled. It got some things right, mainly “Within the current paradigm, a blemish seems like a referendum on who you are as a person.” Skincare-as-moral coding is something I’ve long read into the marketing of certain brands like Glossier (still buy their makeup) and many “clean beauty” lines. About my own skin anxiety I wrote, “My face is something I can’t hide, and if I can’t present something close to perfect to the world, then I’ve failed at self-management.” Skincare can be exhausting. It can bring on a new wave of stress when I’m struggling with self-harm and the chasm between the now and the ideal seems wider than ever. And because skincare is a huge industry like any other, it can be hard not to cave to the pressure to try every new trend and wonder if the routine you’ve locked down is good enough, expensive enough, or Holy Grail enough.